5 Innovative Technologies That Can Actually Improve Sales Performance
Discover how to improve sales performance by implementing innovative new technologies to help reps use data and streamline processes.
Blog Post
9 minute read
Jun 30, 2025
Sales teams face more pressure than ever to deliver results, but working harder isn’t always the answer. The real advantage often lies in working smarter, and that starts with the right tools. As customer expectations rise and deal cycles grow more complex, technology can help sales professionals stay focused, efficient, and ahead of the curve.
But not all sales tech delivers on its promises. Some tools overcomplicate simple tasks or pull attention in the wrong direction. The key is finding innovations that actually improve performance by streamlining workflows, surfacing valuable insights, or supporting better decision-making in the moment.
Below, we highlight five technologies that are doing just that. These aren’t just nice-to-have add-ons; they’re practical, high-impact tools that teams are already using to increase productivity, shorten sales cycles, and win more deals.
The Role of Technology in Improving Sales Performance
The role of technology in sales is constantly changing because the technology itself is evolving every day. With new tools, innovative use cases, and a changing digital landscape, staying ahead of the game when it comes to tech has become important for reps to continue providing the best possible experience.
Here’s a quick rundown of some areas where technology helps reps improve their performance:
Using data: Accurate and comprehensive customer data is key to understanding how your target audience thinks, what their goals are, when to reach out, how to address their pain points, their challenges, and what you can give to them to make their lives easier.
Connecting with customers and prospects: There are more ways to connect with people than ever before. Sales technology can help keep reps organized when balancing all the mediums available to them and their prospects and clients to connect at the right time, on the right platform, with the right message.
Improving the experiences: One of the biggest benefits of new technology in sales is its ability to improve the overall experience for prospects and clients as well as the reps themselves. Streamlining processes, automating actions, and smoother communications all combine to make for a better sales experience.
Streamlining processes: Speaking of streamlining processes, for reps, technology can take the reins of many actions like data entry, contact management, deal management, communication, and more by automating them and freeing up time for more mission-critical tasks.
The Importance of Modern Technology in the Business World
How to Improve Sales Performance with Technology
Now that we see how technology can improve sales performance, let’s look closer at the specific tools that can unlock the hidden potential within your sales process.
1. Use a CRM to Simplify Your Processes
A strong, connected, top-shelf customer relationship management (CRM) platform is a modern must for salespeople looking to grab an edge over the competition. They help simplify the sales process by helping to manage touchpoints as they come up between a rep and their lead. By simplifying tasks like data entry and organization, this frees up a lot of time that reps can spend on more meaningful tasks that can make an impact on their numbers.
These CRMs also integrate with existing tools like document managers and communication channels to streamline all sales tasks under one roof. The centralization of everything you need to do your job eliminates wasted time and lost production by allowing you to communicate with all your prospects in one place, having access to all your data, and removing the need to spend time searching for needed information. With a CRM, it’s all right there and ready to go.
Additionally, using a CRM to collect, organize, and report data removes much of the human error element involved in data, which improves accuracy and makes it easier for salespeople to use the data in a real situation. A third-party software can also be used to provide higher context to your own data in order to make predictions based on overall trends and use a larger database to confirm information for accuracy.
The time has never been better to implement a CRM into your business, either. The global market for CRMs is expected to reach $128.97 billion in 2028. Basically, the CRM market is exploding, and those without these platforms soon will find themselves falling behind quickly.
2. Smart Communication Tools
Communicating has never been easier or more complicated than ever before. Yes, that makes no sense, but it’s true. There’s never been more ways that reps can communicate with leads, prospects, and the overall audience, but that choice makes things more difficult if the right technologies aren’t in place. Juggling phone calls, emails, chatbots, SMS messaging, social media, video conferencing, and other forms of communication can be difficult.
This is where technology comes into play to help reps make sense of it all and take some of the manual work away.
For example, an automated chatbot can initiate a conversation and guide a prospect toward content, specific website pages, videos, or eventually to a sales rep after asking and getting answers to key questions and funneling them into a live chat or phone call.
Similarly, emails can be done smarter, too. Instead of spending huge amounts of your time writing, scheduling, following up, and analyzing your emails, you can be more efficient and effective.
Imagine a world where your most routine emails are sent automatically, followed up with automatically, and stripped down to the numbers so you can clearly see what works and what doesn’t. This doesn’t have to live in your imagination; it’s technology that exists today and is being used by the people you need to beat.
This isn’t just for emails, either. This kind of smart automation can be done for your social media accounts, text messages, meeting scheduling, and more to make the process easier for you and your prospects.
3. Automating Manual and Repetitive Tasks
As we mentioned above with automated communication, automation is a very useful tool for sales reps that has a lot of uses beyond just communication. Take your time-consuming, frustratingly manual processes and use the power of automation to streamline them.
Here are some of the areas within sales where automation can be implemented to improve efficiency, and in turn, sales performance:
Prospecting: Running searches on companies or people within industries can be very time-consuming. Automation can take information from your CRM or external tools and sites and deliver it to you in an easily digestible way so you can skip to the fun part.
Proposals: Integrations and automation can work together to pull information and fill fields to make drafting proposals easier and faster.
Deal Management: Log, track, and organize every touchpoint during the sales process, and organize your follow-ups and next steps within an automation platform.
Calendars: Use automation to schedule and update meetings with prospects without lifting a finger.
Contact Management: Automatically enter, organize, and manage the prospects in your CRM so you spend less time manually entering information and more time using it to nurture leads.
4. AI and Machine Learning
AI and machine learning can be a helpful tool during every step of the sales process, from first contact to deal closing. AI and machine learning can help reps make sense of and pull relevant data when building a report or creating documentation, and AI can be used in the vetting and communication process in the form of chatbots, which can get the conversation started.
Additionally, AI and machine learning can also be used in forecasting by analyzing past data to predict what the future may bring. This can help an organization find new customers, predict when deals may close, and make sales projections based on live data.
AI is a fast-growing technology that opens up a whole new world of possibilities in the sales process.
5. Making Use of Data and Aligning with Marketing
Many of the previously mentioned technologies come together to make this possible, but one of the most important aspects of sales technology is making data more accessible and usable during the sales process. This data can provide valuable insights into audience preferences, location, demographics, and more. To collect and report on this data, reps can make use of AI, machine learning, CRMs, and automation which all help to streamline different points in the data collection process.
Much of this data comes from the marketing team (if there is one), which means it’s important that those two departments are correctly aligned, communicating, and able to share data easily. That’s where technology comes in, too.
Between the two departments and many sales technologies, reps can actually use data in their decision-making and create data-driven strategies aimed at improving sales performance.
How Can Technology Encourage Repeat Sales?
What about when you’ve locked in the sale and are now looking to delight a customer and potentially bring in repeat sales or cross-selling? Technology has you covered.
For example, CRMs can help you track customers post-deal to stay in touch with them and to offer exceptional customer service experiences post-sale. Additionally, you can automate touchpoints like check-in emails, surveys, polls, and other reminders to continuously touch base.
It’s all about providing a positive experience to the customer, ensuring their needs are met, they’re happy with the service/product, and that you’re always there to give them what they need, especially if it’s more of the same or a chance to add on more sales.
Implementing New Technology Smoothly
Sometimes the hardest part of bringing in new technology is the implementation process. Training reps on best practices, ensuring everyone has the tech needed to operate these new tools, establishing procedures to ensure all these best practices are being followed, and making certain that everything is working as intended are all aspects of implementation that have the potential to create roadblocks along the way.
Luckily, experts exist to help handpick solutions and develop implementation plans to ensure that everything works perfectly all the time, so you never miss out on an opportunity due to a technological mishap. When done ineffectively, technology implementation can create headaches for reps and other users, creating costly downtime as people struggle to adjust.
This is why it’s important to have a plan for adopting and implementing innovations effectively.
Empower Your Sales Team with Tech and Training
Investing in cutting-edge technology is exciting, but the reality is that the tech alone won’t take your sales team to the next level. If your employees don’t know how to use it (or why it matters), those tools just become expensive distractions.
Training bridges the gap. It’s how you turn fancy features into real-world results. A well-trained team doesn’t just understand the mechanics of the technology; they know how to use it to solve problems, build relationships, and close deals more effectively. It’s about shifting from "Ugh, another system to learn” to “Wow, this makes my job easier.”
When you empower your team with the right training, you’re not just investing in their skill set, you’re investing in their confidence.
Ultimately, investing in training is critical to unlocking the full potential of your investments in your technology and your people.
Final Thoughts on Blending Technology and Sales
Getting comfortable learning and working with new technology is a key skill for modern employees. As more advanced technology becomes more integrated into workflows throughout entire organizations, from marketing and advertising to finance, and of course, even sales, being able to onboard new technology with efficiency is crucial.
By investing in smart technology, you can streamline the sales cycle, give your sales staff more room to operate, and make closing deals a whole lot smoother.
